Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2018-04-11
David Pogue, the humorous tech commentator at the NYTimes, seems to know something about eggcorns (You can access an archive of his creative video work at his NYT blog site.). In a recent twitter Pogue pointed out his son’s confusion between “orthodontist†and “orthodentist.â€
“Dontist” and “dentist” derive, of course, from the same Latin word for tooth. “Dentist†came into English via French in the eighteenth century. “Orthodontist†was a Latin portmanteau coined in the late 1800s to describe a subspecies of dentist.
The replacement of “orthodontist†with “orthodentist†touches on a topic we have often addressed on this forum, the question of whether acorn/eggcorn pairs that share etymological roots are real eggcorn events. The decision turns on a number of issues. One issue is whether the eggcorner is aware of the shared history. Another is the semantic directions taken by the two words since their divergence–eggcorns that introduce little or no semantic novelty are not usually interesting. A third is the amount of time the words have spent apart: in general, the more recent the divergence of the two words, the less potent the eggcorn.
What do you think? Would you call “orthodentist†an eggcorn?
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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It’s eggcornesque although it doesn’t surprise and delight, which I suppose is the best test of all.
What about ‘equalevent’? No surprise or delight there. What’s needed is a word for an inadvertent regression to the root idea.
On the plain in Spain where it mainly rains.
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Unlike, say, David Tuggy, I define eggcorns “from the outside.” I’ve argued before that ultimately the determination of eggcornicity has to lie with the eggcornista—by which I mean a reasonably well-informed speaker of the language who’s also well acquainted with the standard acorn and its underlying concept—and not with the eggcorner. So even if the latter doesn’t recognize that the (ultimately) Greek dont+ root is cognate with the Latin dent+ root, it really doesn’t matter that much—many speakers of English will understand that orthodontists are, as Kem said, “a subspecies of dentist,” and will probably assume fairly quickly and accurately that some kind of relationship must link the two words.
I like Juan’s “surprise and delight” test. I think that even those who argue that eggcornicity should be determined “from the inside” would agree that the lack of new imagery robs this reshaping of its power to surprise—though not of its interest.
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Do I define them “from the insideâ€? I suppose I do, but not exclusively from the inside. I do think it is important to know if the eggcorner takes the eggcorn to be the standard form of the phrase or word in question, and if he/she does not, the “surprise and delight†that the eggcornista may experience doth not an eggcorn make. However, I do agree that such (“insideâ€?) considerations as a striking and unexpected but nonetheless reasonable meaning shift are also important for defining an eggcorn –and even more for grading eggcorns–, that such considerations tend to produce the “surprise and delight†which is so central to our enjoyment of eggcorns, and that they must (probably by definition) be evaluated from the perspective of someone other than the eggcorner (thus “outsideâ€), eggcornista or otherwise.
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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